Never Trust A Lady

by Kathleen Creighton

  Just inside her bedroom doorway she halted, then continued, the smile gone, now that there was no longer a need for it. A tear began a lonely journey to the place where her smile had been.

  “Oh. Tom,” she whispered as she stood gazing down at the face of the man now sound asleep in her bed. He was lying on his side facing toward her, his head pillowed on his hand, mouth half-open…vulnerable, unguarded, in need of a shave. She reached out a hand to touch the hair that had fallen across his forehead, then pulled it back. After a moment she raised her arms and drew her tunic over her head and let it fall to the floor. Then she carefully lifted the edge of the comforter and slipped between the sheets.

  Tom stirred in his sleep, and his arms came around her, pulling her close as he nestled her bottom against his belly. “Cold?” he murmured when a shiver she couldn’t control coursed through her.

  “No.” she whispered gently. “I’m fine.”

  His only reply was an unintelligible mutter, followed by a faint snore. Lying very still so as not to disturb him, Jane settled down to wait for morning.

  Hawk knew even before he opened his eyes that something was wrong. Something had awakened him-some sound-but whatever it was, it was quiet now.

  And that was it. The thing that was wrong. It was too damn quiet. He couldn’t hear Jane anywhere, not in the bathroom, or the kitchen, or anywhere in or around the house, as far as he could tell. The place sounded-felt-empty.

  He threw back the covers, swung his feet around and stood up, found his pants on the floor where he’d dropped them, briefs still neatly in place inside his khakis, and pulled them both on in one swift, smooth motion. Zipping and buckling as he went, he crossed the room, bypassed the empty bathroom and stalked in his bare feet down the hallway to the kitchen. Empty.

  Through the kitchen window he could see the red Nissan in the driveway. For some reason it looked lonely. A quick check of the carport confirmed his suspicion: Jane’s car was gone. He figured it must have been her starting it up and driving off that had waked him. He didn’t know why that realization filled him with such unease, but it did. Something was wrong. He knew it was. Why had she left without waking him? Why hadn’t she said goodbye?

  Swearing under his breath, he closed the door and was about to bolt back into the bedroom after his shirt and shoes when he saw the note printed in Magic Marker on the magnetic message board stuck to the refrigerator door:

  TOM! HAVE TO GO TO WORK. THERE’S COFFEE AND ENGLISH MUFFINS. PLEASE (underlined) EAT SOMETHING!

  She’d signed it simply, Jane. Her signature looked smudged, as if she’d written something else, wiped it out and written her name over it instead.

  Well, sure, thought Hawk, momentarily relieved. It’s Monday. She had to go to work. That explains it.

  But the cold, uneasy feeling came creeping back, twice as bad as before. Because hadn’t somebody told him-Campbell, probably, or Devore, or maybe she’d told him herself-that she worked in a bank? What the hell kind of bank opened at this hour?

  “Carlysle,” he groaned aloud, “what are you up to?”

  His stomach was burning and churning, and only partly from lack of food. He was so keyed up already he didn’t think coffee was a good idea, and he didn’t have time to wait for muffins to toast. He noticed that the kettle full of untouched soup was still there on the back burner of the stove; he poured some into the coffee mug she’d set out for him and drank it down cold, swallowing the lumps of meat and vegetables whole. He knew it was going to hit his stomach like a hand grenade, but he couldn’t help that; he needed the food, and the idea of eating nauseated him.

  He had a bad feeling about this. He couldn’t remember ever having had such a bad feeling.

  As if someone had been watching him, the cellular phone began to ring as he was settling behind the wheel of the red Nissan. He let the seat belt snap back into its well, snatched up the phone and barked, “Yeah!”

  “Hawkins-where the hell’ve you been?” It was Agent Campbell, sounding more excited than vexed. “I’ve been trying to get you all night. You weren’t in your-”

  “No,” said Hawk as the ignition fired, “I wasn’t. Listen-”

  “Things are about to pop over here. If you want to be in on it, better get your butt in gear now. It’s turning into a regular circus, you want to know the truth-CIA arrived last night, that’s one thing I wanted to tell you-and a bunch of guys from Mossad just called in to say they’re on their way, and not to do anything until they get here. Seems they think they oughta have first crack at her, I guess, because of that Israeli jet that went down two years-”

  “Jeez,” Hawk broke in, “who the hell’ve we got here, anyway? Khadafy’s wife?”

  “That’s the other thing I wanted to pass along. We’ve got a tentative ID on the lady with all the paintings. Took a while-still sorting things out over there at the Kremlin, it seems. Finally came through about four this morning.” Campbell paused. Hawk ground his teeth and spun gravel as he turned the Nissan onto the paved road. “Ever hear of Galina Moskova?” Hawk frowned and grunted a negative. “Alias Emma Butterfield Parker?”

  Something began to nibble at his memory. Something ugly.

  “Code name…The Duchess?”

  “Holy…” Hawk went on to further embellish his favorite word, and when he ran out of possibilities, muttered, “We thought she had to be dead. Jeez. You’re sure?”

  “Sure as we can be. It was that fingerprint your people turned up that did it. There’s never been a decent photo, and any descriptions would be, what, ten years out of date? And it’s likely she’s altered her appearance anyway. But the prints don’t lie. It’s her, all right.”

  Hawk didn’t say anything for a few moments. He was on the highway now, pushing it as hard as he dared on the narrow country road, made more treacherous with patches of ground fog that had collected in unexpected places. He felt as though some of that fog had settled inside him. Jeez…Galina Moskova. The Duchess. Emma Butterfield Parker.

  He remembered it all now. No wonder the hit on Loizeau had seemed so clean and professional. Back in their glory days, Galina Moskova had been one of the KGB’s most ruthless and successful assassins. As sought-after interior designer Emma Butterfield Parker, she’d moved almost unnoticed through Britain’s upper crust, pulling off an unbroken string of high-profile hits, many of them so discreetly done, it wasn’t until the fall of the Soviet Union that it had been known for certain they were hits, and not unfortunate accidents or death from natural causes. Discretion and restraint-those had been Emma’s trademarks. She’d had a reputation for never using an ounce more muscle than it took to get the job done.

  Like at the auction, Hawk thought. Using just enough poison on Aaron Campbell to knock him out, but not enough to kill him. That was Galina, all right.

  And Loizeau? But he’d seen her, spoken to her, face-to-face. So of course he’d had to die. Neatly, cleanly, hadn’t even seen it coming. That was Galina, too.

  Dear God…Jane. It came to him suddenly, like a hard left to the midsection. If anyone in the world could identify the woman, Jane could. They’d been friends. Shared meals, confidences, a hotel room…a tube of toothpaste. Would that make a difference to Galina Moskova?

  Hawk knew the answer to that. His heart felt like a lump of ice.

  “Ten years or so ago,” Campbell was saying, “apparently our Emma saw glasnost coming, saw the handwriting on the wall, and went AWOL.”

  “We assumed her own people had shut her down,” Hawk said in a leaden voice. “Permanently.”

  “Yes, well, I’m sure Emma saw that in her cards and that’s why she split. Anyway, seems she went underground for a while, then quietly opened up for business, near as we can tell, about seven, eight years ago-private business. Now she works for the highest bidder.”

  “Hired gun on an international scale.” Hawk swore softly.

  “Yeah, but apparently not limited to that. She’s been a busy lady. We’ve turned up connect
ions to the Libyans-”

  “God. Not-”

  “Yeah, and as I said, the Israelis want her for their crash also-”

  And we’ve connected her to Sicily. And that means…

  “-And we’ve got suspicions about half a dozen other terrorist bombings in Europe over the past eight years…”

  Marseilles…April 1990. A beautiful spring day, warm sunshine and a mistral blowing, making the masts in the small-boat harbor clank with their own kind of rhythm, like a band of children making music with spoons and pots and garbage-can lids. Two days left of spring break from Tom’s job teaching history at the American School in Milan…They’d spent the morning on the beach, watching the windsurfers dip and dart though the waves like butterflies. That afternoon they’d planned to explore La Canebière and look at the model ships in La Musée de la Marine. Jason had been promised ice cream, but it was sieste time, and everything was closed They’d walked past café after café, teasing Jason and telling him stories to distract him, when they’d come upon the street…he couldn’t remember the name of it now…a street with no traffic, paved with stones and lined will all sorts of little shops and cafés. And in the middle, the merry-go-round playing a tune…what was the name of it? It was from a movie with Leslie Caron, he remembered, and for years he’d heard it in his dreams. Hi Lili, Hi Lo, he thought it was called.

  “Hawkins? Are you still there?”

  “Yeah.” It came out so garbled, he cleared his throat and repeated, “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “You know this changes things.”

  No kidding.

  “If this is Galina Moskova we’re dealing with, then she’s got to be working for somebody with big bucks. I mean, government-big. She wouldn’t come cheap.” Campbell paused. “I’m thinking Libya.”

  “Well, whoever it is,” Hawk said through the truckload of rock in his throat, “I don’t think she’s gonna be sitting here in Cooper’s Mill, North Carolina. waiting for her customer. She’s gonna be going to see the boss. So if you’re figuring on waiting for the rendezvous and getting both birds with one stone…”

  “Right. So we move on her as soon as we know she’s got the disk. Uh, by the way, Hawkins?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What can you tell us about Mrs. Carlysle? We, uh, seem to have lost our… Ahem. The, uh, surveillance equipment we had on her seems to be down for some reason. You wouldn’t know anything about that, I don’t suppose.” Campbell’s voice was carefully neutral. “Or where she might be at the moment?”

  “No, I don’t.” Hawk rubbed a hand over his eyes and then across his unshaven jaw. He felt like nine miles of bad road. “But I’ve got an idea she may be headed your way.”

  “Say again?” He could hear the FBI agent’s voice crack.

  “You heard me. I don’t know where she is. But I think she might be on her way to a meeting with our suspect.”

  Campbell borrowed Hawk’s word and made it his own. “You don’t think she means to warn her?”

  “Warn her of what, for God’s sake! Use your head. She doesn’t know anything. Look-I don’t know what she’s up to, but I’ll tell you this-she hasn’t got a clue who she’s dealing with.”

  There was a pause, during which Agent Campbell held a mumbled conversation with someone on his end, and Hawk made the discovery that none of the cow pastures he was driving past now bore any resemblance to the ones he’d driven past last night.

  “Hawkins?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You figure Mrs. Carlysle to be heading for the suspect’s house or her store?”

  Hawk thought about it while he was peering through the windows and checking all his mirrors, hoping to find something that looked the slightest bit familiar. “My guess would be the house,” he muttered. “Too early-the store wouldn’t be open, would it?” Damn. It seemed to him one cow looked pretty much like every other cow. And the same went for daffodils.

  “Yeah, you’re probably right In that case, we should be okay.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I just got word-suspect’s on the move. She just left her house in a blue van, and is heading into town. We are in position. What’s your ETA?”

  “Damned if I know,” Hawk snarled, and disgustedly hit the wheel of the red Nissan with the palm of his hand. “I think I’m lost!”

  “My goodness, such a lot of cars for this early in the morning,” Jane said to herself as she glided through the green signal light and onto the brick-paved square. She wondered if it was jury-selection day over at the courthouse, or if maybe the Rotary Club was having a breakfast meeting at the Cooper’s Corner Café.

  Connie’s Antiques looked dark and empty, but that didn’t mean anything. Connie was almost always in her shop early on Monday mornings, especially if she’d been on a buying trip over the weekend. Often Jane would leave for work half an hour early on Mondays, just so she’d have time to drop in at the shop and see what treasures her friend had brought home this time. Connie would have the teakettle on. and a tin of those English biscuits she liked, and she’d tell Jane all about her trip, and Jane would admire-and sometimes wistfully drool over-her latest purchases.

  Right now. Jane thought, she’d most likely be in the back of the shop somewhére, just as usual, busy unpacking, cataloging, pricing and marking the things she’d bought at the auction in Arlington. Just as usual…

  Oh, God, she thought, please don’t let it be true. This is Connie. Connie…my friend.

  But her heart was pounding so hard it hurt, and she kept taking deep breaths that didn’t do any good. Her hands were like ice, and her legs felt weak and shaky.

  Okay, she was terrified.

  But she had to know. She had to.

  Connie’s van wasn’t in its usual place in the tiny unpaved parking lot behind her store. Jane pulled into a spot far enough away from the back door so there would be plenty of room for the blue van and settled down to wait.

  Alone in the quiet car, Tom came to her. She could smell him…feel his warmth soaking through his sweater and into her skin…feel the tender roughness of his whiskers against her softest places. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine he was there with her now…hear his emotion-scratchy voice saying, “Well, Carlysle, what have you got to say for yourself?”

  No regrets. Even now. How could she regret something so wonderful, so lovely and rare, just because it was for only one night? She might as well regret lilacs, because they only bloomed once every spring…or bluebirds, or shooting stars, or dolphins. Once in a lifetime.

  Her lips even curved in a smile as she remembered the gift he’d given her, that she would carry with her for the rest of her life, like a secret keepsake, hidden close to her heart. The gift of a single word. “Wow…”

  She was debating whether to turn off the engine or leave it on so she could run the heater, when she heard the van bump down the potholed alley and roar into the parking lot behind her. Her hand shook as she turned off the ignition.

  Shivering, she stood beside her car and waited while Connie backed the van into its place and climbed out, jingling keys. Giving Jane a little wave, she bent to unlock the back door of the shop, then straightened, calling out cheerily, “Hullo, dear-back from Washington so soon?”

  Sidling closer, Jane thrust her hands into the pockets of her coat and gave a nervous laugh and a little shrug of vexation. “Oh-wouldn’t you know, the girls have gone off skiing with their father? Very spur-of-the-moment-typically David. Of course, I’d have had to come back to work today, anyway. Unless I took a sick day, I suppose. I could have, but if I’d stayed longer, I wouldn’t have had anyone to pick me up at the airport, would I? So I guess it’s just as well…” She was babbling. She never babbled.

  Take a deep breath, Jane.

  “There, dear, you’re shivering.” Connie was standing beside the back door of her shop, holding it open for her, smiling in her usual friendly way. “Do come in-I’ll just put the kettle on.”

  Chapte
r 17

  Hawk was climbing back into the driver’s seat, having just received directions to the main highway from a farmer in a pickup truck with a bale of hay the size of Delaware in the back, when the cellular phone rang.

  “Jeez,” he muttered to himself as he grabbed at it, “they got a camera in this thing, or what?”

  Campbell sounded out of breath. “Hawkins? Not good news here. Mrs. Carlysle just showed up at the suspect’s shop.”

  Hawk threw the Nissan into Drive and swore with a vehemence unprecedented even for him. “Get her out of there,” he snarled. “Now.”

  “No can do. The suspect’s en route, due to arrive any minute. Can’t risk being spotted.”

  “So, what now?” The Nissan’s tires spun briefly on wet grass before they made contact with pavement. Hawk set his jaw and pressed down on the accelerator pedal. “You can’t go in. Not if there’s a chance-”

  “Look, Hawkins,” Campbell said with the arrogance that made the FBI such a pain in the butt to work with sometimes, “you’re just gonna have to trust us, okay? We’re not any more anxious than you are for some innocent civilian to get caught in the crossfire, but we both know what’s at stake here. We’ve taken every precaution, and we have every reason to believe we can pull this off without anybody getting hurt.”

  Every reason to believe? thought Hawk. Great. Just great.

  “We’ve got the whole place wired,” Campbell went on in a smug Bureau purr that made Hawk grind his teeth. “Both picture and sound. We’ll be monitoring the situation from the word go. We’ve got both front and rear exits covered, plus the alley, the parking lot and the whole damn square, and a Hostage Rescue Team ready to roll just in case.”

  In case? In case what? Hawk wanted to shout. In case Emma/ Galina puts a gun to Jane’s head, the way she did to Loizeau’s? If she does that, you moron, there won’t be anything for the Hostage Rescue Team to do except carry in the body bag!